The antique stores closed. Many of the buildings they were in are falling apart. Crews just tore down half the block.

Only one business remains: The Fat Finch. It's an oasis between a storefront that is empty and another that has no roof or back wall.

On Friday and Saturday nights, it's a prime rib destination for diners from Athens, Gainesville and even Atlanta.

Above all, it's the 7-year-old creation of Kim Hannon, who is holding her ground as her neighbors have disappeared. Her building could have suffered the same fate, but she couldn't let that happen.

"This place was a wood shop for years, and it burned - yes, I bought a burned-out building," she said, laughing about it now. "They were going to tear it down, and I couldn't let them tear it down."

Similar circumstances brought Hannon to Maysville in the first place. She left Atlanta 15 years ago looking to buy an old house. She found a big one in the small town north of Commerce.

A few years later, she bought the downtown building and spent another year cleaning it out. It has a new roof now, but the walls and chocolate-colored hardwood floors were mostly intact.

Hannon wanted to rent the building at first and found a woman who wanted to open up a restaurant and tea room, but she got out of the business soon after starting.

So Hannon jumped in.

She outfitted the two-story restaurant with antiques and old photos, chairs that didn't necessarily match and a lot of decorations she had in her closets at home. She put up a small picture of her husband, and an unknown customer wrote "Winner of the 1978 Burt Reynolds Look-alike Contest" underneath it.

(Seriously, Hannon's husband could've been a stunt double in "Smokey and the Bandit.")

Just about everything on the shelves has a price tag on it.

"This place used to be a general store - actually, it was more like a Victorian Walmart," she said. "That place had everything. We kind of kept that feel."

Then there's the giant painting of a mountain inside the small kitchen. Hannon went to school in the Colorado mountains, but left the area because the only jobs were on the slopes or in the restaurants.

"It's funny because I could go back now and work in any restaurant there," she said and laughed again. Hannon laughs a lot.

And while Colorado may be her grand plan, she doesn't have a timetable.

For now, she sticks to making everything on the menu from scratch. Her meats are all hormone-free. Her salmon is caught in the wild.

Then there's the prime rib, which comes from a special kind of cow in Kentucky.

"That's what the serious regulars come in here for when we do dinner," she said. "Everyone loves that prime rib. It's seriously the best beef in the world."

No matter who the clientele - sans the vegetarians - and where they come from, most come for that prime rib. Hannon didn't recognize how crazy her regulars were about it until she tried to offer a different steak one night.

No one wanted it.

"They all wanted the prime rib," she said.

The beef is so good that even prime rib haters - customer Lillian Phillips is married to one - love it.

"If you come here on a Friday night, you've got to get the prime rib," she said.

Phillips first found out about The Fat Finch when her Red Hat Ladies group stopped in for a dinner one night. She and Hannon have been sharing coffee and gossip ever since.

Thursday afternoon, Phillips stopped in just to say hello. She has pulled up her stakes and moved to Commerce, but she still comes around often for some small-town conversation.

Phillips can't stay away from Hannon's chicken salad, either. Hannon vouches for the Philly Cheese Steak sandwich - made from the prime rib - and her Reuben, which she slowly has been getting her regulars to try.

Most everything comes with sweet potato fries, which Hannon serves up with barbecue sauce. Trust her, she said, it's a good combination.